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9 Vintage Paperback Novels to Add to Your Summer TBR Pile

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The best books about AI

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9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

With the dawn of a new millennium about to break, the Nineties was a strange, floating decade of positivity, hope and something called the World Wide Web. 

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Books that defined the 2000s

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Features

From sweaty to sultry: why fiction loves a heatwave

Jackets of Ian McEwan books, tiled diagonally against a blue background

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The essential Ian McEwan reading list

An illustration of a woman sitting on a pile of copies of Mrs Dalloway, reading Mrs Dalloway, next to a shelf of other copies of Mrs Dalloway

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On the particular pleasures of re-reading

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Interviews

‘This novel had everything’: an oral history of Ian McEwan’s Atonement

From Alex Garland to James Joyce, Yaa Gyasi to Kate Chopin, here are some of the most memorable beach scenes captured in literature. 

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The most memorable beach scenes in literature

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Ian McEwan on rewriting the past: ‘it’s not quite a dystopia, it’s something slightly better than reality’

7 books about the dark side of growing up

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7 coming-of-age books about the dark side of growing up

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Ian McEwan on Briony Tallis

First Love, Last Rites

Marks the debut of a talented and genuinely imaginative writer

As promising a first collection of stories as I have ever come across

Ian McEwan writes to shock and succeeds... It is a tour-de-force of concision, and funny, too, in a deadpan manner

And now for a brand new writer of formidable talent, Ian McEwan who is 27. His stories First Love, Last Rites…are the most devastating debut I have seen for a long time

A brilliant debut by the most promising writer around

Now 40 years since first publication, McEwan's first published work is still his most hauntingly dark and atmospheric.

A talented and genuine imaginative writer. McEwan's details often grow into strange, powerful images - the ironies, throughout this impressive collection, are tellingly weighted

Ian McEwan writes to shock and succeeds... All his stories have a feeling of impending evil - it is a tour de force of concision, and funny, too, in a deadpan manner

His writing is exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing

McEwan has - a style and a vision of life of his own... No one interested in the state and mood of contemporary Britain can afford not to read him

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of eighteen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; Machines Like Me; and Lessons. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Taut, brooding and densely atmospheric, these stories show us the ways in which murder can arise out of boredom, perversity can result from adolescent curiosity, and sheer evil might be the solution to unbearable loneliness.

Solar

A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: his wife is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster.

The Daydreamer

Ian McEwan writes stories of exquisite precision and clarity

As far-fetched and funny as anything by Roald Dahl

Perfectly judged, scary, poignant, meaningful; he makes it look easy, but this is brilliantly achieved

These stories are so good, as acute about childhood preoccupations, and at times as disturbing as you would expect

Brilliant...the quality of imagination at play here is something special

Peter Fortune is a boy who likes to daydream. He dreams about swapping bodies with his cat and with his baby cousin, but he gets so lost he's unsure where one fantasy finishes and the next begins. Cartwheeling through these transformations, Peter eventually finds himself in an adult body experiencing the adventure of falling in love. 
 
'As far-fetched and funny as anything by Roald Dahl' Vogue 
'Perfectly judged, scary, poignant, meaningful; he makes it look easy, but this is brilliantly achieved' Guardian

The Comfort of Strangers

Rediscover the classic novel of love, violence and obsessions from Booker prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling author Ian McEwan. 
 
Colin and Mary are a couple whose intimacy knows no bounds. Away on a holiday together in a nameless city, they get lost one evening in a labyrinth of streets and canals. They happen upon Robert, a stranger with a dark history, who takes them to a bar and ushers them down into a subterranean land of violence and obsession. 
 
‘Haunting and compelling’ The Times 
 
‘No reader will begin The Comfort of Strangers and fail to finish it; a black magician is at work’ New York Times

In Between the Sheets

The second collection of blazingly original short stories from Booker prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling author Ian McEwan. 
 
A two-timing pornographer becomes the unwilling object of one of his victim's vengeful fantasies. A millionaire buys himself the perfect mistress – passive, yet beautiful – but the union soon becomes a nightmare of jealousy and despair. And an ape reflects on the relationship with a young female writer, mourning their fading love and musing on the fateful deceptions of art. In these seven stories of dream-like lucidity, the wasteland of the human psyche is mapped with deadly precision. 
 
‘Resonant and frightening...totally original’ Observer 
 
‘Exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing’ The Times

Black Dogs

His best yet, which I should make clear is saying a great deal

Brilliant...a meditation on the intoxications of violence and the redemptive power of love

Superbly evocative prose... The novel's vision of Europe is acute and alive, vivid in its moral complexities

Compassionate without resorting to sentimentality, clever without ever losing its honesty, an undisguised novel of ideas which is also Ian McEwan's most human work

Black Dogs is a dark and brooding masterpiece from Booker-prize winning Sunday Times bestselling author Ian McEwan. 
 
In 1946, June and Bernard set off on their honeymoon. Fired by their ideals and passion for one another, they had planned an idyllic holiday, but in France they witness an event that alters the course of their lives entirely. Forty years on, their son-in-law is trying to uncover the cause of their estrangement and is led back to this moment on honeymoon and an experience of such darkness it was to wrench the couple apart. 
 
‘Powerful... Unforgettable’ Sunday Telegraph 
 
‘Thoughtful and compassionate’ London Review of Books

Ian McEwan

What We Can Know is a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart. I loved it

2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroys his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.

Ian McEwan

Praise for What We Can Know

What We Can Know is a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart. I loved it

Books by Ian McEwan

Series by Ian McEwan

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

Articles featuring Ian McEwan